Abstract for Sandra Chung's talk

Chamorro Possessives at the Interface
Sandra Chung (UC Santa Cruz)
October 31, 2008 (Friday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, The CUNY Graduate Center

One of the recurring issues at the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface concerns the division of labor: should generalizations at this interface be explained in syntactic or semantic-pragmatic terms? Take, for instance, Milsark's (1977) generalization (MG) and what I call Horn's (1989) generalization (HG), which are stated below.

Milsark's Generalization (MG): Subjects of individual-level predicates must be strong. Horn's Generalization (HG): Subjects tend to be interpreted outside the scope of sentential negation. Do these generalizations flow ultimately from the syntax of Logical Form, as Diesing (1992) claimed for MG? Or do they flow from a semantics-pragmatics enriched by the Brentano-Marty- Kuroda theory of judgement types--specifically, from the two-part nature of the categorical judgement--as proposed by Ladusaw (1994) for MG and by Horn (1989) and Ladusaw (1996) for HG?

In this talk, I investigate these questions for Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands. Chamorro possessives have both a head determiner and a possessor. My inquiry focuses on bare possessives, in which the head determiner is the null indefinite article and the possessor is definite. After establishing that bare possessives are indeed a species of indefinite, I show that their ability to serve as subjects of individual-level predicates argues for an account of MG in terms of the theory of judgement types. I then show that the interaction of bare possessive subjects with negation appears initially to threaten an account of HG in terms of this theory. However, once the semantics-pragmatics of the possession relation (Barker 1991, 2008) is factored in, the threat dissolves. The conclusion seems to be that a uniform theory of this interface--if there is one--is more likely to be framed in terms of semantic- pragmatic notions than in terms of the syntax of Logical Form.

You can download the audio recording of the talk in WMA format here.
You can download the handout from the talk in PDF format here.